About The Project

The project, based in Surrey Quays, Canada Water, London has seen 280 commercial and residential units take shape over the past two years with an additional 160 to follow on.

Specially designed to speed up install times whilst adding strength to partitions, SMARTPLY DRYBACKER was chosen to provide support for heavy fixtures and fittings secured through the plasterboard.

The product features a pre-cut recess in the rear of the panel, designed to accommodate ‘C’ shaped metal studs meaning the panel will fit snugly to most commercially available drylining systems. The pre-sized modular format and factory cut groove mean there is no requirement for cutting or modifying on site eliminating excess dust and noise.

“Pre-rebating the product means that we increase the usability to the installer, doing away with time spent cutting and sizing the product on site,” says David Murray, Innovation Manager at MEDITE SMARTPLY.

“Our aim when creating this product was the same as all of our innovation projects: to solve the problems encountered everyday by end users. With SMARTPLY DRYBACKER we identified the need to cut down time adjusting and cutting panels on site, which can cause unnecessary hold ups in construction projects.”

SMARTPLY DRYBACKER is the first of its kind to be factory prepared in this manner, and contractors are reaping the rewards.

“The fact that the boards do not require cutting on site is a really important benefit for us. It saves my teams and I a lot of time cutting the panels down, then rebating individual slots in each board. As a result, we also have less power tools on site, which reduces cause for concern around health and safety,” says Simon Dixon, Managing Director at SD Plastering.

“As you can imagine, cutting that amount of board on site also creates a lot of dust. Eliminating the need to cut the boards removes this extra hazard, further reducing risk to our workers.”

“We needed enough board to fit out 280 units, so if a product can save us five minutes on each board installed then we can save ourselves a matter of days over an entire project, which makes us and our clients very happy. It’s for those reasons that we’ll be using SMARTPLY DRYBACKER again when we push for the next stage of the project this year.”

With reduced installation time, reduced dust, reduced noise and reduced use of power tools on site, SMARTPLY DRYBACKER certainly is the superfast, heavyweight champion.